If you have been making content in Lagos, or anywhere in Nigeria, you already know the ceiling. You build the audience. You get the views. Maybe you start landing some brand deals. And then somewhere around that point, the climb gets harder in a way that has nothing to do with your content and everything to do with everything around it. The manager who is figuring things out at the same pace you are. The production budget that never quite stretches to the idea in your head. The IP and the deals and the business that should be accumulating value, but somehow is not. That ceiling is not your fault. It is structural.
Damilare Adeyemi and Alese Ayomide Salban have known each other since they were kids. More than fifteen years of friendship, which means when they decided to build something together, they were not starting from scratch in the way most co-founders are. Their company, GAAGA World, launched out of Lagos in 2025 with a proposition that is different in kind, not just degree, from what existed before. They invest. They do not just manage. The standard agency model takes a percentage of what you earn and helps you navigate the work. GAAGA World does something structurally different. It takes a position in what you build. Revenue-share agreements. IP equity. Financial stakes that mean the company’s returns are tied to your long-term success, not just your next campaign. That alignment is the thing. It means whoever is sitting across from you at GAAGA World has an actual reason to care whether your career compounds.
Salban explains where the idea came from. ‘We started off wanting to make better content ourselves. And then we realised the problem was bigger than what we wanted to produce. The same thing stopping us was stopping everyone. Ideas exist. Money sometimes exists. What does not exist is the structure to bring it together properly.’ He makes a point that hits harder the more you think about it. Nigeria was producing ambitious, varied, original creative content before the internet was even properly here. Now, with smartphones and YouTube and global distribution and brands actively trying to spend money, the dominant format is the short skit. That is not a reflection of where Nigerian creativity actually is. It is a reflection of what the environment has made easy.
Adeyemi, who holds a Master’s in Data Science from the University of Salford and brings experience from the fintech sector, adds the context that backs the ambition. The global creator economy is sitting at around $500 billion, according to Goldman Sachs. Africa’s creative economy is projected to reach $2.6 trillion by 2030, per the African Development Bank. Nigeria’s music market and Nollywood’s international momentum are part of what drives that number. The value is real. What has not been built is the layer of infrastructure that allows African creators to actually capture a proportionate share of it.
GAAGA World offers talent management and career development, studio access for music, film, and digital content, venture-style funding with no upfront cost to the creator, brand and merchandise partnership support, and an incubation programme for people just starting out. Further down the roadmap is an image rights licensing platform that would treat a creator’s personal brand and image as a formal, tradeable asset, the way royalties work in music. No upfront cost. The risk sits with them.
The company is making its public debut this month, embedded throughout VVS Lagos ‘Afromodernism’ Week, which runs from July 5 to 12 across the city. VVS is one of Lagos’s most established creative conventions — now in its fifth edition — spanning fashion, art, film, music, and technology.
This year’s theme, Afromodernism, is about the conscious reconstruction of African identities using the tools of the future while remaining rooted in the past. GAAGA World has a station at every event across the week, from the Opening Gala on July 5 through the runway show and closing party on July 12, moving through the panels at Alliance Française, the art collectors’ viewing at Blank Space Oniru, the trunk show at Mikano, Future Labs at Yenwa Gallery and British Council, and the VVS Film Experience along the way.
If you are making content, building something in music, fashion, film, or digital media, and you have ever felt like the ambition is there, but the room to execute it properly is not, that is the gap GAAGA World is here to close. Not with promises, but with capital, infrastructure, and a model where the company succeeds only when you do.
